On the Other Side of Eternity

Looking back at a letter from her half-brother, Gore Vidal, written on the 1957 occasion of her first pregnancy, the author remembers a tortuous life—and the things she learned while watching it from afar.

The death of Gore Vidal in July of 2012 removed a steady mentor from my life—though, as with so many people who live long lives, afflictions other than death effectively removed my half-brother from me several years earlier.

Gore and I shared the same mother, Nina Gore (Vidal Auchincloss Olds). She married my father, Hugh Auchincloss Jr., after having Gore with her first husband, Eugene Luther Vidal. I have no memory of ever seeing my mother and father together—they were divorced after five years of marriage—but my first memory of Gore was in my father’s house, Merrywood, at the top of the second-story stairs. I must have been three or four years old. He was in his bedroom, molding a huge clay head of our mutual maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, a Democrat and one of the first two U.S. senators from Oklahoma.

The next time I remember Gore was in the late 1940s. He had come to Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., to visit our maternal grandmother, “Tot,” Nina Kay Gore. He was unshaven, in a three‐piece suit, sitting in the middle of Tot’s couch close to a clean‐shaven younger man. It was Howard Austen, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. After our mother and my father’s divorce, both Gore and I left Merrywood; I went to live with our mother, and Gore, after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, joined the army.

During the autumn after my 1957 marriage to Newton Steers, I wrote Gore: “I’m pregnant.” By then I was 20 years old. The baby was to be the first of three sons: Ivan, Hugh, and Burr. Gore at the time was under contract with MGM and was said to be one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. As such, he was frequently out of the country—mostly in Europe—working on scripts on location. Gore responded to me from London on blue Claridge’s stationery, playing the role of avuncular Gore, rather than English professor Gore.

He started by declaiming on subjects not normally associated with his work: marriage, working motherhood (with or without a man), pregnancy, and advice on how to live a fulfilling life.

His letter does not mention the portion of my mother’s divorce settlement with my father, Hugh Auchincloss, that she gave up to create a small trust fund for Gore.

Writing personal recollections about someone who is famous tends to inspire caution when, like myself, you are not even infamous. So I was relieved to read Gay Talese’s remembrance of Gore in Time, as some of his thoughts were my thoughts about my half‐brother. Talese describes Gore as acerbic, in public, competitive and ambitious. But in private he could be “solicitous,” as when Talese received “terrible” reviews for his book Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Then, Gore reached out with consolation. His considerate nature was often conveyed through the privacy of personal correspondence.

Talese, in his remembrance, also takes a step in breaking down Gore’s publicly difficult persona: he points to the difficulty of being gay at a time when it was not easy to acknowledge such a thing. Talese writes: “I do believe his reputation, such as it was, on television—argumentative and supercilious and sometimes downright nasty—I think it had to do with the fact that he couldn’t be relaxed in public as he would have been with small groups of people.”

Growing up in a political family (his father was Franklin Roosevelt’s first head of the Civil Aeronautics Board), Gore did not miss out on a prohibitive case in point: Sumner Welles was a top foreign-policy adviser to Roosevelt who eventually served as Under Secretary of State. In 1940 he was forced to resign over accusations that he had solicited sex from a pair of male African American Pullman-car porters while traveling to the funeral of Alabama congressman and Speaker of the House William Bankhead. As his son Benjamin Welles points out in his biography of his father, the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were times when “sexual deviation was never discussed let alone condoned.” As the son of a member of the Roosevelt administration, this lesson would be one that would have been hard to ignore for Gore.

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Because of what Gore knew he was in private, and his parents’ “public status,” Talese posits that Gore “built a kind of wall within which to defend himself.” The public life out in the world that he wanted and would achieve, when pitted against the private life he already had, inevitably produced a tension that kept Gore Vidal’s head and heart molten. It is not for nothing that Christopher Isherwood dedicated A Single Man to Gore Vidal, the first sentence of which reads: “Waking up begins with saying Am and Now.”

The Economist remembers Gore as a “public intellectual.” Gore thought of himself as something of a public patrician, with his family connections to the Auchinclosses, and through my father, the Kennedys, and Bouviers. But with the publication of his revealing—and somewhat titillating—1995 memoir, Palimpsest, Gore suddenly became “public lover.” (That same year his nephew and my son, the painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers, died of aids—a disease he documented through his art.)

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Despite his own fame, and the fact that I had always wanted to become a horse or a nun, Gore’s letter warned me against “success worship which is dangerous and destructive without an underlying purpose.” It was an impulse he himself battled his whole life. “If there is [no purpose to one’s pursuit of success], then one should face that squarely in the best renaissance Borgia way and simply say to oneself: I mean to rise because I mean to rise . . . that at least has the virtue of honestly.”

From his cradle to their grave, Gore was brought up with—and inspired by—“famous” people, including his parents and grandparents. He went with his grandfather to the U.S. Senate. His father, an all-American quarterback from South Dakota, had a professional football career and then was the Commerce Department’s director of aviation. Gore starred as a child in a Pathe newsreel in 1930, flying, with his father as co‐pilot, the Hammon Flivver. 1 His parental experience in fame brought out the *Zeitgeist-*er in Gore. He later admitted guilt: “I decided to get more headlines than any of them.” 2 At their knees—or at least waists—Gore learned the most basic step to stardom: stand close to the stars. There’s Gore, the self‐anointed centerpiece in my 1957 wedding photo of our groomsmen.

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Unacquainted with almost everyone in the picture, including some of his own family, Gore serenely assumed front and center, sidelining prominent groomsmen including New Republic editor Michael Straight, Florida congressman Paul Rogers, and Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. The last he described in his letter to me as “a consciousless opportunist who wants to be President just for the sake of being,” someone consumed with “showing everybody, here is a man.” Within four years Jack would indeed enter the White House.

“The happiest lives,” Gore wrote to me in 1957, “are those spent absorbed in some activity which is various and intriguing.” Besides literature, running for public office, and acting, Gore told me the world missed his true genius: real estate. He more than mastered number three on mankind’s basic-urge list: food, sex, shelter.

Gore bought El Carmen, a church in Guatemala, for $2,000 in the 1940s. He borrowed $3,000 from our mother toward the purchase of Edgewater, on the Hudson River. La Rondinaia, his villa in Ravello, Italy, was his pièce de résistance.

By 1995 on the Amalfi Coast, Gore’s walks up and down the cliffs had become promenades of the past, no longer possible given Howard’s chain-smoking emphysema and Gore’s energetic, scotch-soaked cocktail hours. La Rondinaia was sold. They moved back to Gore’s house on Out Post Drive, in Los Angeles, California, where Howard died from lung cancer, ending 54 years together.

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Relatively stoic, rarely complaining when it came to physical discomfort, Gore’s neglected person and lapsed hygiene bordered on that of a street person in the last few years of his life.

Isolating himself from his doctor of more than 20 years, old friends, literary executors, Gore accompanied by Ernie Bernal traveled east to observe the revival of his play The Best Man. When Gore returned from New York City that fall, in 2011, his photo appeared on the *New York Post’*s Web site. He looked dangerously dehydrated, weighing about 90 pounds. This finally prompted Gore’s being checked into Los Angeles’s St. John’s Health Center Hospital, where they allegedly photographed his physical neglect, presumably at least in part so they could not be sued for his condition.

Suddenly, Gore’s law firm, Rodi Pollock Pettker Christian & Pramov, ushered blood relatives back into Gore’s life to see him. Receiving in his hospital room, Gore, a longtime diabetic, had a bottle of Macallan scotch by his bedside even as the hospital staff tried valiantly to rehydrate him.

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In his 1957 letter to me, he wrote: “Life is not a race course of competitive examination. At worst it calls for endurance and at best it calls for a certain virtue in one’s dealing with oneself.” Life’s real fulfillment, he said, is not fame or success, but rather “finding some one thing of interest to you and going at its mystery whole‐heartedly. The virtue of the arts is that one never masters one’s form. The challenge goes on right to the end.”

On the same page, Gore turns back to my pregnancy, the issue at the start of this philosophical adventure: “In an odd way these accidents have a way of turning out most happily, if only because they are facts and it’s always easy to have some attitude towards a reality, as opposed to the confusion with which we survey the imponderable.”

He closed with hopeful thoughts about his first Broadway play, Visit to a Small Planet, and anticipation for our mother’s impending visit to Claridge’s (which resulted in a relationship‐terminating fight over his life with Howard Austen and her addiction to alcohol).

Once old, some people put away childish things. But I couldn’t help but be reminded of his advice to me on the beginning of my son’s life as I witnessed the end of his. In his last days Gore revived happy memories, childhood favorites: cornbread, served hot from dawn to dusk. (Buttermilk, not ice water, ran in Gore’s veins. As with our beautiful mother, eventually it curdled.) During his last two-and-a-half years he did not write. The last book in Gore’s hands, according to Washingtonian’s Carol Joint, was his boyhood favorite: The Wizard of Oz.